Location tracking is a fundamental procedure in mobile networks. In a GSM network, for calls incoming to the UE in idle mode, the network has to wake up the UE by paging messages. Instead of paging the UE in all cells of the whole network, the network keeps tracking the UE's location using the Location Area (LA) concept. The cellular network is statically partitioned into multiple geographical regions, i.e., many LAs. Each LA contains a number of cells. The UE is designed to register to one LA at a time and perform location updates, so the distribution of paging messages can be confined to the LA where the UE most recently reported to the network. The size of the LA is a key variable in the performance of location management. A well-known tradeoff is shown in FIG. 1. The smaller the LA, the more frequent the location updates. On the contrary, a larger LA causes more paging signals. The impacts of frequent location updating are higher signaling overhead, higher paging miss rate, and higher battery consumption. To highlight the issue in common, a simulation study was conducted to evaluate the paging cost efficiency of different Paging Area (PA) cell clustering. In the simulation, the cellular network was configured as a virtual hexagonal grid, where the inter-site distance was 500 m. The PA dimensioning for a hierarchical URA scheme and a distance-based scheme (also known as UE-centric scheme) is in line with the hexagonal cell layout with different radii, as shown in FIGS. 1 and 2. In the present disclosure, the terms LA, PA, Paging Notification Area (PNA), Tracking Area (TA), UTRAN Registration Area (URA) and cell cluster are analogous and interchangeable. The number of cells in a PA with radius R is:
      M    ⁡          (      R      )        =      {                                                      1              ,                                                          R              =              1                                                                                                            M                  ⁡                                      (                                          R                      -                      1                                        )                                                  +                                  6                  ⁢                  R                                            ,                                                                          R                =                1                            ,              2              ,              3              ,              …                                          .      
Tens of thousands of real-world GPS traces are taken into the custom-designed computer simulation. The GPS locations in WGS 84 ellipsoid coordinate are converted to the pixels in the 2D Cartesian coordinate by an azimuthal equidistant projection where the center point is just as the GPS dataset, and then mapped to the hexagonal coordinate system. By definition, the paging cost efficiency is the ratio of the actual number of visited cells to the maximum possible number of visited cells. FIG. 3 shows the results of paging cost efficiency of the virtual distance-based and hierarchical URA schemes, with respect to different PA radii. The two dynamical location tracking schemes are on par with each. The paging cost efficiency is getting lower when the paging budget is getting higher. A finer-grained PA brings higher paging cost efficiency. The insight derived from the study is that the root cause of low paging cost efficiency is the inflexibility of cell clustering to shape the PA along the mobile trajectory, not the problem of static cell clustering. In this regard, the cell mask of PA is used to keep tracking the mobile down to the cell level, such that the maximum paging cost efficiency can be accomplished by the finest granularity.
Human or user mobility is highly regular and recurrent by nature. “Limits of predictability in human mobility, Science, 327(5968), 1018-1021” describes 93% potential predictability that can be exploited to improve the location tracking which is essential and fundamental in supporting user mobility in wireless cellular networks. In this regard, a method for location management by cell masking and context-mapping to keep tracking a UE down to a cell level is disclosed